The increasing global energy consumption based on fossil resources and the entailed production of greenhouse gases demands for new strategies of carbon management. Additionally, the depletion of the world-wide oil, gas and coal reserves stresses the need for alternative carbon sources for the production of fuels and chemicals. In this context, the sustainable use of carbon dioxide as carbon resource has been envisaged by chemists and chemical engineers for decades, and the field has seen a highly dynamic development recently. Particularly the effective hydrogenation of carbon dioxide to methanol could contribute strongly to the development of a low-carbon economy, where methanol serves as energy vector and offers a versatile entry into the chemical supply chain.
Therefore there is a constant need in the art for alternative reduction methods of carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide derivatives to methanol, especially methods which are capable of reducing carbon dioxide to methanol directly.